What Is Dark Matter? NASA Science for Kids

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What Is Dark Matter? NASA Science for Kids

what is dark matter reddit

They’ve built exotic telescopes – sensitive not to optical light but to less familiar gamma rays, cosmic rays How to buy aave and neutrinos – to search for the high-energy radiation that is thought to be generated through the interactions of dark matter particles. Candidate particles can be grouped into three categories on the basis of their effect on the fluctuation spectrum (Bond et al. 1983). If the dark matter is composed of abundant light particles which remain relativistic until shortly before recombination, then it may be termed “hot”. A second possibility is for the dark matter particles to interact more weakly than neutrinos, to be less abundant, and to have a mass of order 1 keV.

Science

  1. On average, superclusters are expanding more slowly than the cosmic mean due to their gravity, while voids are expanding faster than average.
  2. Although the idea of dark matter dates back to the 19th century, it was a Caltech astrophysicist named Fritz Zwicky who in the 1930s developed the idea in its modern form.
  3. Gravity, the force that pulls you to the Earth and attracts all matter together, began to pull these particles toward each other.

The dark matter that comprises the other 26.1 percent of the universe’s matter is in an unfamiliar, nonbaryonic form. The absence of light from these particles also indicates that they are electromagnetically neutral. These properties give rise to the particles’ common name, weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). The precise nature of these particles is not currently known, and they are not predicted by the standard model of particle physics. However, a number of possible extensions to the standard model such as supersymmetric theories predict hypothetical elementary particles such as axions or neutralinos that may be the undetected WIMPs.

what is dark matter reddit

Who came up with the idea of dark matter?

Or hypothesized particles called axions that interact with magnetic fields might be detected in laboratories or in space. But matter that has no electromagnetic interactions will be invisible to our eyes. So-called dark matter carries no (or as yet undetectably little) electromagnetic charge. No one has seen it directly with his or her eyes or even with sensitive optical instruments. Yet we believe it is out there because of its manifold gravitational influences.

What exactly is Dark Energy and Dark Matter?

That is because dark matter carries five times the mass of ordinary matter and, furthermore, does not directly interact with light. Both these properties were critical to the creation of structures such as galaxies—within the (relatively short) time span we know to be a typical galaxy lifetime—and, in particular, to the formation of a galaxy the size of the Milky Way. Without dark matter, radiation would have prevented clumping of the galactic structure for too long, in essence wiping it out and keeping the universe smooth and homogeneous.

Combined with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, researchers concluded that the universe is expanding, carrying galaxies along with it. One of the most vexing gets at the heart of what our universe is actually made of. Cosmological observations have determined the average density of matter in our universe to very high precision. But this density turns out to be much greater than can be accounted for with ordinary atoms.

We do observe such “gravitational lensing” effects, but only often enough for MACHOs to account for at most a few per cent of the mass we do not see. So most cosmologists now think instead that we are submerged in a sea of dark matter – a gas of “weakly interacting massive particles”, or WIMPs – that pervades the entire volume of our galaxy, including our solar system. Every second, millions to trillions of particles of dark matter flow through your body without even a whisper or trace. This ghostly fact is sometimes cited by scientists when they describe dark matter, an invisible substance that accounts for about 85 percent of all matter in the universe.

A special case of direct detection experiments covers those with directional sensitivity. This is a search strategy based on the motion of the Solar System around the Galactic Center.138139140141 A low-pressure time projection chamber makes it possible to access information alpari forex broker review on recoiling tracks and constrain WIMP-nucleus kinematics. WIMPs coming from the direction in which the Sun travels (approximately towards Cygnus) may then be separated from background, which should be isotropic. Directional dark matter experiments include DMTPC, DRIFT, Newage and MIMAC.

Dark matter does not interact directly with radiation, but it does affect the cosmic microwave background (CMB) by its gravitational potential (mainly on large scales) and by its effects on the density and velocity of ordinary matter. Ordinary and dark matter perturbations, therefore, evolve differently with time and leave different imprints on the CMB. As an alternative to dark matter, modifications to gravity have been proposed to explain the apparent presence of “missing matter.” These modifications suggest that the attractive force exerted by ordinary matter may be enhanced in conditions that occur only on galactic scales. However, most of the proposals are unsatisfactory on theoretical grounds as they provide little or no explanation for the modification of gravity. These theories are also unable to mastering private equity set explain the observations of dark matter physically separated from ordinary matter in the Bullet cluster.

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